Online advertising may be an important source of revenue for enterprises engaged in electronic commerce. A number of different kinds of page-based online advertisements are currently in use, along with various associated distribution requirements, advertising metrics, and pricing mechanisms. Processes associated with technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enable a page to be configured to contain a location for inclusion of an advertisement. An advertisement can be selected for display each time the page is requested, for example, by a browser or server application.
One variety of online advertisement is the display of advertisements based on a user's query term and/or query location. For example, a user may conduct an on-line search for a coffee shop in San Francisco. In this way, ads may be displayed for advertisers having relevant businesses located near the user's query location. Alternatively, a user may shop online to look for a particular product and/or retail store within a certain area. Just as a user can identify coffee shops in San Francisco, one can find baseball gloves or sports stores in Los Angeles. Typically, a variety of listings appear. A problem may occur for a consumer in deciding which retail store to visit to buy the product. Likewise, a problem may arise for an advertiser to decide in which locations to purchase online advertisements.